Woman with Guitar 1917

María Blanchard made this painting, "Woman with Guitar," with what looks like oil on canvas. The color palette is muted, mainly dark greens, browns, grays, blacks, and a kind of fleshy pink. It feels like it came into being slowly, shifting and emerging through trial and error. I sympathize with the artist imagining what it might have been like to create. It's so cubist, it makes me think that Blanchard was playing with and against what Picasso and Braque were up to. It's not as radical as some of their stuff, but it's still got this cool, fragmented, and faceted feel. I bet she was thinking about how to break down form and space into different planes. There is this sort of aggressive geometry mixed with softer shapes, and it creates a unique tension. You can feel the pull between representation and abstraction. It’s like she’s showing us how seeing is also a way of thinking and feeling. That fleshy pink, how it picks out the hands and face, is so powerful. It's a way of thinking through painting. Artists are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring each other’s creativity across time.